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Rum’s the word

By Karl Sabbagh

NO ONE argues about the sequence of events. Early in the morning of 5 August
1948 John Raven set foot on the jetty at Loch Scresort, a coastal inlet of the
Hebridean island of Rum. Raven was a 34-year-old classics don and brilliant
amateur botanist, said by friends to have an almost mystical understanding of
plants. He was about to need every scrap of that understanding. For he had come
to this remote corner of the British Isles with an unusual quest—to find
evidence to incriminate and possibly ruin the career of a senior British
botanist.

That eminent botanist was one John Heslop Harrison, a member of the Royal
Society and a professor at the University of Durham. For years, Heslop Harrison
had been provoking unease among the British botanical community with a series of
startling claims about the plant life of the Hebrides and particularly Rum,
repeatedly announcing the discovery of rare species on the island that had
previously only ever been seen growing hundreds of miles further south. The last
straw was a humble-looking sedge called Carex bicolor, a rarity never
seen in Britain before. Botanical high-ups were suspicious. Something had to be
done. So Raven stepped forward as a willing and able agent.

Heslop Harrison knew about the expedition. At that time, no botanist went to
Rum without his permission. The island was privately owned, and with the
agreement of its owner Heslop Harrison had managed to establish a kind of
botanical fiefdom there. He may have allowed Raven on to the island thinking he
was just another interested amateur come to admire his remarkable
discoveries—a notion Raven himself did nothing to counter.

Once on the island, it took Raven just two days to find what he was looking
for. Some of the rarities were simply nowhere to be seen, others were present in
colonies which, with clever detective work, Raven could show were fakes (see
“The grass also sings”). The plants were not Hebridean natives at all: they had
been cultivated elsewhere and secretly transferred to Rum

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Back in Cambridge Raven set out his evidence in a report. Heslop Harrison
ducked and wove when Raven wrote to him with his charges, and never admitted any
guilt. But the rest of the botanical community believed Raven. Heslop Harrison,
they agreed, had committed a botanical fraud that was every bit as scandalous as
the famous `Piltdown Man’ bones fake.

And then, silence. Raven’s report was lodged in a Cambridge college library
with instructions that it was not to be read by anyone while Heslop Harrison and
his son, also a botanist, were still alive. Raven continued a successful career
in classics, while Heslop Harrison continued to teach at his university, and to
report discoveries in the Hebrides that were equally dubious. Unlike the
Piltdown scandal, scientists would keep the story of the botanical fakes to
themselves for decades.

Professional gossip

So why am I able to bring it into the open now, via this article and my book?
I came across a brief reference to the Rum expedition in an obituary of John
Raven in 1980. But it was only recently, on discovering the name of the
incriminated botanist, that I decided to ask Raven’s widow if I could read the
report. Three questions intrigued me. Why would Heslop Harrison risk his
reputation by committing such a fraud? Or was he set up—the victim,
perhaps, of a student prank? Why did professional botanists encourage Raven’s
detective work, only to turn their backs on the evidence? And how many more
scientific frauds have yet to stray outside the realm of professional gossip and
bar conversations?

The first botanists I approached claimed it was all a storm in a teacup. The
editor of the latest edition of Flora of the Outer Hebrides, for
instance, wouldn’t hear a harsh word said against Heslop Harrison even though
his book contains a litany of the professor’s discoveries described as
“dubious”, “in error” or “unconfirmed”. Others refused to talk at all because
Heslop Harrison’s son, a former director of Kew Gardens, was still
alive—he died last year—or would insist on anonymity when passing on
information.

Fortunately, a few botanists did think it was time the Heslop Harrison story
was told. So, from the report, journals, obituaries, dusty boxes of
correspondence and little-read memoirs, I began to piece together a picture of a
man with a passion for grand scientific theories who was frustrated by his
inability to convince colleagues—and of a man with a streak of paranoia,
fuelled perhaps by modest roots and by being in a provincial university at a
time when Cambridge and Oxford so dominated British higher education.

The “cover-up” turns out to be all the more remarkable because the Rum
discoveries weren’t the only puzzling findings Heslop Harrison reported over the
years. In the 1930s, for example, just as he was beginning his Hebridean work,
Heslop Harrison published some astonishing research on moths. The fact that
successive generations of moths develop darker wings in smoke-blackened
industrial areas of the country is often seen as a classic example of Darwinian
selection. But Heslop Harrison supported the contrary Lamarckian theory, even
then considered unorthodox, which held that creatures could pass on
characteristics acquired during their lives. By way of experimental evidence, he
claimed that feeding moths with noxious chemicals of the type found in
industrial smoke could cause their offspring to have darker wings. No one proved
the findings were faked, but nor has anyone been able to reproduce them.

Any possibility that the Rum findings were the result of incompetence or a
student prank evaporated when I came across an entomologist who spent years
analysing some of Heslop Harrison’s research into water beetles. The beetle man
was definite: more fakery.

Why, then, was this roll call of dubious data, produced over decades by a
leading British biologist, not sufficient to get him drummed out of the
profession? Several reasons—many of them all too common in cases of
alleged scientific fraud.

First, which body was his offence against? He wasn’t breaking anybody’s rules
other than those of good scientific research, and no one was responsible for
monitoring those rules and disciplining offenders. Secondly, convincing as
Raven’s report is, it is not conclusive. Nobody actually went to Heslop
Harrison’s garden to see what he was growing there.

Finally, what good would have come from retribution and full public exposure?
Although many of Heslop Harrison’s discoveries made it into the reference books,
they could all be quietly dropped in future editions so that no major harm was
done to science. Rumours and gossip alone, his opponents probably thought
(wrongly as it turned out), would be enough to restrain Heslop Harrison from
further wrongdoing. To expose him publicly would not only have been disastrous
for Heslop Harrison, it could have brought the entire botany profession into
disrepute.

Easy to justify

So, why did he do it? What people usually mean is: why do scientists fake
results when they must know they’ll be found out once people try to repeat the
results? Here’s what I think the answer is.

This type of scientific fraud is easy to justify to yourself if you believe
in the theory you are trying to prove. There’s no point faking to persuade
people of a theory you know is rubbish. Sooner or later, the sheer weight of
failures to replicate will wipe out any advantage you might have got. But if you
believe the theory is true, your perception changes. Your fakes “could have”
happened, and somewhere, somehow, you believe, someone will find similar,
genuine data. They must do, because the theory is “true”.

Heslop Harrison’s big theory was something called “perglacial survival”. He
believed that the distribution of plants and insects throughout the Hebrides
proved that some forms of terrestrial life had survived there in the 1.7 million
years during which Scotland and the north of England were repeatedly covered
with ice from a series of ice ages.

Most other scientists rejected the theory, arguing that it would have meant
plants surviving on a few ice-free mountain tops and then recolonising the lower
slopes, which they felt was improbable. Had Heslop Harrison’s Rum findings been
genuine they could have helped to make his perglacial survival theory
respectable, because they would have provided evidence of unusual plant
communities containing species killed off elsewhere.

I think Heslop Harrison believed that eventually plants would be discovered
on the fringes of the British Isles that supported the idea of perglacial
survival. If that ever happened, his own discoveries would be seen as the
pioneering research he wanted them to be. Similarly, he believed that his work
on moths would herald a new understanding of evolution. Every now and then when
I talk to scientists about the Heslop Harrison story, they tell me about other
frauds. Many seem to fit the same mould. The fraudulent “findings” support a
theory the fraudster passionately believes in.

It makes sense, really. If science is about the slow and steady search for
truth, what pleasure would there be in knowing that the platform on which you
have built your theory is made of straw? It would be like cheating at patience.
But if your fakes hasten the day when the truth will be generally accepted, then
it’s just possible to see a perverted justification for them.

THE PLANTS at the centre of the Rum scandal were not showy specimens with
colourful flowers, but plain-looking rushes and sedges–the sort of species
non-botanists would lump under the heading “grass”. In the 1940s, however,
British botany was driven by an almost obsessive desire to identify what plants
were growing where, however humble-looking. Heslop Harrison’s Hebridean
discoveries would have been major finds if true.

How did John Raven establish that plants growing on the island had been
transported there rather than being natives? His evidence came from some clever
detective work. Heslop Harrison’s most surprising find, for instance, was a
sedge entirely new to Britain, called Carex bicolor. Raven found it to
be present on the island in the place the professor claimed, but in a very
unnatural looking colony. One plant looked as though it had been dug into the
ground with a trowel, while several had weeds in their roots which were rare on
Rum but very common in the sort of garden Heslop Harrison would have cultivated
at his home near Newcastle. Soil analysis carried out back in Cambridge revealed
particles of quartz among the roots of one of the plants, and the site was a
long way from any natural quartz on Rum.

To cap it all, Raven found that some of the plants were infected by a gnat
which had been reported in only two other places in Britain—one being
Heslop Harrison’s garden.

It was a similar story with another of the professor’s Hebridean discoveries,
Polycarpon tetraphyllum. This plant was also growing on the island in a
colony with strange companions, including a plant often grown in botanical
gardens which in the wild had never been seen nearer to Rum than the
Canaries.

The grass also sings

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Karl Sabbagh is a writer and television producer. A Rum
Affair is published in Britian this week by Penguin (£16.99)